ABSTRACT
Although his niche in the musée imaginaire of canonical philosophers is assured, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) certainly doesn’t owe his historical signi…cance to the sponsorship of a vital tradition of philosophical work. Oblivion long ago engulfed his nineteenth-century acolytes (Philipp Mainländer, Eduard von Hartmann), and his most agile reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, found his own philosophical voice by emancipating himself from the thrall of Schopenhauerian pessimism. Scrutiny will also show that those philosophers of the twentieth century who drew inspiration from Schopenhauer’s writing (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Gehlen, Max Horkheimer) could do so only while rejecting his central themes. Today Schopenhauer’s thought, in contradistinction to the work of his master Kant and his antipode Hegel, no longer provides a conceptual frame for serious philosophical inquiry. The twin pillars of his systematic edi…ce (the skeptical reconstruction of Kant’s epistemology and the doctrine of the metaphysical Will) are generally dismissed as erroneous or whimsical; the scholarship devoted to his work is, for the most part, antiquarian. One wonders wherein his importance lies. A possible answer is that Schopenhauer presents us with the intriguing case of a philosopher whose work elicits conviction primarily through the force of aesthetic presentation. The achievement of his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation (1996 [1818], hereafter WWR) and its companion publications is to project a compelling, albeit dark and slanted, image of the totality of life. The single thought that Schopenhauer means his system to exfoliate – the thought that the world is Will and representation throughout – is most aptly interpreted as an encompassing metaphor. A variant of that metaphor opens book 2 of WWR: as long as we endeavor to grasp the essence of things along lines set down by the principle of suf…cient reason (Satz vom Grunde), we resemble someone circling a castle, in vain seeking an entrance, and occasionally sketching – as if that could help! – the façade (WWR I, Par. 17). It is a telling fact that the core thought of a philosophical system could …nd perspicuous formulation in a single conceit. And it is equally telling that Franz Kafka consigned the protagonist of his novel The Castle (published 1926) to an existence within the space of meaning limned by this very …gure. The conspicuous feature of Schopenhauer’s legacy is that it has been most fecund not in academic philosophy (for which his contempt was boundless), but in a tradition of literary writing that includes,
along with Kafka, other artists of staggering achievement such as Melville, Tolstoy, Hardy, Machado de Assis, Mann, Proust, Pessoa, Borges, Beckett and Cioran. As long as the worlds their works disclose remain compelling, Schopenhauer’s philosophical vision will continue to exert its fascination. An interpretation of Schopenhauer that accentuates the aesthetic purport of his thought …nds support in his own understanding of philosophical activity. Schopenhauer did not endorse a conception of philosophy as deduction from a self-authorizing …rst principle in the fashion of Reinhold or Fichte, nor as the self-explication of the Notion in the manner of Hegel. Indeed, he judged any construal of philosophy as governed by the principle of suf…cient reason to be misguided from the outset. Although certainly af…ne to science (in the capacious sense of Wissenschaft) by virtue of the fact that it takes shape within a conceptual medium, philosophy, properly understood, is not a science, but an art. The task of art is to communicate the content of an aesthetic intuition (Anschauung), something typically accomplished in such media as stone, pigment, word-conveyed imaginings, or musical tones. Just this, according to Schopenhauer, is what the philosopher ought to do with concepts. Schopenhauer’s sense of his own originality has one of its roots here. He believed that subservience to and inappropriate application of the principle of suf…cient reason had hobbled most of philosophy before him. Aristotle serves as the paradigm for this misunderstanding of philosophical activity, while Plato, together with Kant Schopenhauer’s most revered precursor, provides the cherished counter-example. Apart from Plato, though, Schopenhauer could point to few “intuitionist” predecessors and it may very well be that Goethe was the source, with regard to this key theme, of Schopenhauer’s most sustaining inspiration. Beyond matters of in¶uence, however, the crucial interpretive point is that Schopenhauer saw the ultimate warrant of philosophical claims as deriving not from reasons proffered (rational argument), but from insights acquired in aesthetic intuition. Philosophy explains nothing. The signi…cance of this quietism as regards philosophical inquiry emerges from Schopenhauer’s systematic project, which this essay sets out to survey.
